Senate sets up votes to fund Homeland Security

Senators have scheduled a string of votes Friday morning in an effort to pass a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill ahead of the midnight deadline to prevent a shutdown.

The Senate will take up its first vote at 10 a.m., setting the stage for the Senate to take a final vote on a DHS funding bill Friday that would be stripped of any language defunding or overturning President Obama’s actions on immigration.

{mosads}The House appears poised to separately move a three-week funding bill for the agency. If the Senate agreed to also pass that measure, it would keep the agency funded for three weeks and give House Republicans more time to try to develop a funding bill for the rest of the fiscal year.

Senators are expected to take a cloture vote on the DHS bill, a vote on the amendment to remove the immigration riders from the bill and then a final vote to pass the clean DHS bill.

Under a deal between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), senators agreed to vote on a clean bill to fund the department in exchange for voting to take up a separate immigration bill focused on Obama’s November executive actions on immigration.

But conservative Republicans have criticized McConnell’s decision to separate the two proposals. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who is up for reelection in 2016, said he will vote against the new bill.

“Obama is more likely to sign legislation that is attached to funding the department, which is why I still believe the House-passed bill was the right approach to addressing this problem,” he said in a statement Thursday.

Lawmakers are under a tight deadline to get the funding bill passed, with the department scheduled to run out of funding and shut down starting Saturday.